Nervousness is Just the Ticket for a Cricket by Scott LaFee - Eureka! on Creators.com

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Nervousness is Just the Ticket for a Cricket

In terms of maternal instinct, crickets don't have any. The females lay their eggs and leave. But some experiments at the University of South Carolina suggest cricket moms still pass along a few lessons to their never-seen young.

Jonathan Storm, a behavioral ecologist, briefly exposed adult lab-grown crickets to predatory wolf spiders. The spiders' fangs were immobilized with wax. The crickets were then allowed to breed, after which Storm studied the offspring's behavior.

Young crickets born to mothers who had been exposed to spiders stayed motionless longer in the presence of spider silk or droppings than offspring of mothers who had never seen a spider. Staying still is one of the ways crickets avoid becoming a spider meal.

Exposing juvenile crickets or eggs to spider cues had no effect on later behavior.

Storm suspects the spider-savvy crickets were "forewarned," perhaps via maternal hormones that made them more jittery and cautious. And longer-lived.

The savvy crickets, which also knew how to hide better, survived three times longer in cages with spiders than the offspring of naive spider moms.

VERBATIM

Over Holland, you'd find how many cows there are.

— Dirk Smit of Shell Oil on the company's experimental airborne detector. Designed to locate oil deposits by the methane gas they release, it may have problems in heavily populated areas where cattle are raised

PRIME NUMBERS

35 — Number, in millions, of books that could be stored on a single cartridge made of a new type of storage tape developed by IBM and Fujitsu

Source: New Scientist

BRAIN SWEAT

Homonyms are words that sound alike, but are spelled differently (to, two, too).

There is at least one pair of homonyms in English that have completely and precisely opposite meanings. Can you name them?

QUIRKS OF NATURE

According to a new World Wildlife Fund report, habitat loss and the demand for body parts for Asian medicines has resulted in a 70 percent decline in tiger numbers in the greater Mekong, which includes Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam.

It's estimated less than 350 tigers survive in the region, and just 3,200 survive in the wild globally.

BRAIN SWEAT ANSWER

Raise and raze, which mean "to erect" and "to tear down," respectively.

'TRUE FACTS'

In terms of their masses, an electron is to a watermelon as a watermelon is to the sun.

WHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER

Pancake Rocks at Dolomite Point, Punakaiki in New Zealand. Rain and seawater eroded away the softer portions of the well-bedded limestone, leaving only the harder sections that produce a layered effect from which the rocks take their name.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.